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Wednesday, December 7, 2016

I have finally found some time to "melt some solder" at my new location and new eShop bench. The bench is not finished yet, but I needed a Solder FIX.

This, like all of my project, is an attempt to make projects as small as my abilities allow.

New eShop Bench

The project that I am working on is some boards I just received back from OSH Park. The boards are a small and part of an experimental HF Receiver. The boards edge connectors are "Castellated" to allow them to be used within a larger PCB circuit, and with attached Headers, they can be used with/on a Solderless Proto Board.

The size of these boards are:
Left: 0.8x1.0 inch,
Right: 0.5x1.0 inch

This is my experimental design, it is a circuit that contain the: HF VFO Mixer, Band Pass Filter (BPF, 40MHz), and BFO Mixer.

The bigger boards on the left are similar to those on the right, except they also contains the Oscillators for both the VFO and the BFO, along with the voltage regulator for the oscillator chip.

The components on the lower half are installed
Ready for some testing
Unpopulated is the VFO/BFO and Voltage Regulator

LTSpice suggests this circuit will work, but assessing the actual performance is the real reason for building this experimental circuit.

Additional circuits will be needed, to make this a real receiver, like: Band Select Filters, Automatic Gain Control, Audio Circuit, a Microcontroller, and Display. Likewise, I will make each as small as I can.